Lock yourself in your room
an option from Worse Either Way
Your room was painted blood red the week before you moved in. You can feel the layers, the streaks someone let leak, drip dry. Landlord, who will proceed to ignore you after this day, smiles plastic as she points it out, just for you, I thought you’d like it?
Today, you lay on the ground and stare at the wall to pass time. The only window is small, and opens to a dark alleyway of grass, weeds, and fresh mint at the side of your neighbor’s house. Not the neighbor who never returns your Good Mornings, the other neighbor who brings you persimmons when her yard is scattered with too much to eat herself. By 3 pm most days, even when it’s perfect outside, your room is dark, a cavernous innard. The air becomes so dry you wake up coughing, panting, questioning the craving in lungs.
Sometimes you sit on your bed, the only furniture in this room, and speak into the dead air. Words like want, words like wish. These sounds hit space and turn to nothing. Some of them stick and hover between you and the walls. Some drop heavy and wet the floor. Others latch onto the corners of your mouth and try to return to where they came. Jamming themselves twelve at a time down throat.
You choke most of them away but some reenter, unsure of where they were born. You imagine they’ll remain lost this way. Somewhere between lung and gut.
When you lived in Michigan, you used to get pity invites through friends of friends to couples-only house parties. You were single, fresh off a break up inspired by your decision to leave California for the career of your inherited dreams. After sliding into too many strangers’ cars, sidewalks, and intersections and calling your insurance four times after getting hit from behind, the side, the other side, the front, only to learn that it is always either nobody’s fault or yours, you learned to prefer driving on ice when the roads were empty. Every weekday you woke up at 4am to be on the road by 5 am for a 9 am start time. Dream job.
When you arrive at the party after your 20 minute, 3mph drive, you take off all your layers and shoes. Host one: a small woman who looks like yoga, offers you a cushion to sit on as you untie laces. You say thank you without hearing the offer, too practiced. You are crouched on one leg at a time for five minutes untangling the knots. Trying to free each foot. You feel each ankle, the muscles in your shoulders, the heat of thighs. Those who listened and said yes to seat, have joined the crowd, kneeling in an unplanned circle around the coffee table. They have a snack tray out. It is mostly fruits and vegetables. Mostly broccoli and cauliflower. Caverns of ranch dressing.
A thick plastic container with an electric lock is passed around the circle three hours into the night. Host two holds host one’s knees and explains how this trap keeps their magic alive. Everyone coos inspiration. Every Friday night, they say staring into each other’s eyes smiling, trying to both tell and let the other tell this same story, we put our phones in the box and that’s it. It’s just us til Sunday night. Without consenting yourself, hand reaches for cauliflower, dips the chilled gray white into the white speckled ranch and places the whole branch in mouth. You don’t chew. You barely circle it with tongue. You just need the weight, the texture of something more uncomfortable to focus on.
They go around the circle telling stories of how they met their other half. After each couple goes, they look to you for a response. They disclaim, it’s not a competition, but what do you think of our love story? Because you are alone, you have been made referee. You smile, cauliflower still whole, warm in your mouth. Make a sound, so different from the last sound-answer, they can’t be sure who’s winning. When it is your turn in the circle, everyone looks to the ground or ceiling: unsure of whether to skip your turn, end the game completely (the final two couples on your right will not like this), or let you speak for the same amount of time everyone else was allotted.
Instead of how you met a love, you talk about how much you hate the cold, how you think you might leave the state even though you just got there eight months ago and this job could change your life if you gave it seven more years. They listen and nod and offer advice through anecdotes that end with and that’s when we knew. They take couple-independent sides of your dilemma and break themselves into teams they name Team Stay and Team Go. They laugh and giggle as they rearrange themselves, letting go of their partner's hands as they disagree public.
At first you think to take notes, remember each person’s point on what you should do with your life, these next seven years, but soon their arguments stray from the original prompt--becoming personal, performative.
Team Go, says yoga, has the floor. She uses the remote control on the coffee table as a gavel.
Well, says someone from a couple who has not yet got to share their love story, why stay when you literally know no one here? Like no one. You can’t be happy. Alone all day, in the cold, with nobody to hold you or tell you you’re beautiful, or even just want you around, notice you. All the pairs unconsciously glance at their counterparts. And, let’s be honest, seven years is a long time to be somewhere you don’t want to be. Heck, so is three years. So is one. You should leave. The rest of Team Go hums emphatically. You belong elsewhere. And maybe you don’t know where yet, maybe you’re afraid if you leave you’ll just keep repeating the same search, but you’ll never know, not until you...say it with me, team. GO. They high five and point to Team Stay for rebuttal.
You nod and nod and smile and nod and slip the cauliflower you earlier spit into a napkin you kept warm between thigh and calf back in your mouth until your turn has ended. Host two sees as you do this, his eyes dart away. Even when it is your turn, you are barely part of the game.
Back when you and your ex still exchanged I love you’s, he bought you a humidifier so you could sleep through the night, so your throat wouldn’t close. So eyes wouldn’t itch. You keep it on high and wrap a towel around the base for the water, too heavy to remain in air. You are not surprised when the wheezing, sore throat, and cough return. You are sure you are growing mold.
N/A Oparah is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer. Her other work has appeared in Madwomen in the Attic, QXotc, Fictional International, ANMLY and other journals. N/A has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain and Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco in Xela, Guatemala. N/A holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and a B.S. in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Duke University. She is the Director of Community Programs at StoryCenter, a digital storytelling non-profit in Berkeley, CA. She is studying towards a PhD at Loughborough University in Creative Arts and Design in the UK. Her novella, Thick Skin, was published with KERNPUNKT Press in April 2021.